Features

Arts

The annual Cowboy Cabaret returns at 5 p.m. April 4 at Alice’s Champagne Palace. The evening includes cowboy poetry, stories and songs. Special musical guests are the Homer Ukulele Society and Neck & Neck. Sign up between 6 p.m. and...

Martin Zeller holds a 5-hour improvisational theater workshop from 9:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. April 18 in the Art Barn behind 1060 East End Road. The class introduces, explores and expands the skills of improvised theater. Through exercises...

Alaska State Parks seeks artists to apply for its first-ever Artist-In-Residence Program to be held this June-August at the Ernest Gruening State Historical Park and cabin, 25 miles north of Juneau.
The program encourages artists...

Backyard

S
outh Peninsula Haven House is holding its annual Women of Distinction awards ceremony and silent auction Friday. The event will be held at Second Star Lodge on Kachemak Drive beginning at 5 p.m.
Julia Person, a former...

The solstice celebration on March 20 will probably be somewhat sedate due to the fact that it’s been pretty much a spring-with-a-cold for most of the winter.
The weather’s been so mild that this is the...

by
Nick C. Varney

Best Bets

Go to any meeting around town and you’re likely to hear the call of Homerus cruditis — that beast we transform into when the spring rhinovirus hits town. Holy hippopotamus! No, we’re not talking a beast with big horns, but rhino as in “...

Friday at 2:45 p.m. the sun crosses the celestial equator, an imaginary line in the heavens above the earth’s equator. We’ll experience one of those cosmic events marking the passage of this big blue marble around the sun....

Anyone who has lived in Homer long enough to remember the real name of the old blue bank building shouldn’t be surprised that the Friday before spring break our weather flip-flopped. Alaska weather has it in for teachers and school...

Seawatch

Ten days into the 2015 halibut season, prices are beginning to fall slightly, but production is nearly nonexistent, at least in the central Gulf of Alaska, Area 3A.
Stormy weather and big tides have conspired to...

Thanks to hatcheries coming back online, lower Cook Inlet is expecting a bumper crop of pink salmon this season.
Fishermen can expect a total run of 2.16 million pinks and a harvest of 1.72 million fish,...

The experimental fishery to determine the feasibility of a seine fishery for pollock in state waters has finished up with mixed results.
The Gulf of Alaska pollock workgroup held its final meeting last month...